MAXIM GRIGORIEV (b. 1980) was born in Moscow and moved to Sweden when he was twelve. He debuted with the short story collection CITIES in 2014, which won the Borås Tidning Prize for debut authors, and published his first novel, NOW, in 2016 to wide critical acclaim.

A stylistic tour-de-force, Grigoriev’s breakthrough epic EUROPE (2021) is a novel about exile, nostalgia and longing for a home that no longer exists, and about the very idea of Europe. An idea that, 70 years after its founding, is so splintered and full of cracks that there is more to be found in the emptiness between the cracks than in the small island slivers that are still intact. EUROPE was nominated for the August Prize and VI:s Literary Prize, and won the EU Literary Prize, Svenska Dagbladets Literary Prize and SmåLits Migrant Prize.

Grigoriev’s latest novel, THE RAIN, was published by Albert Bonniers Förlag in 2022. Maxim is also a literary translator from Russian and currently lives in Paris with his wife and their children. 

Agent: William Crona

“Nice,” he said, “is a city… A city to disappear in.” “Every time I come here,” I said, “it feels like discovering a new side of myself.”

Nominated for the August Prize, winner of the 2021 EU Literary Prize.

Nikita, finds himself adrift in Nice, a sun-soaked Mediterranean city that, for centuries, has attracted Russian emigrés and authors. He has inherited a waterfront apartment from the mysterious Nina.

Beset by the exile’s sense of alienation, angst and emptiness as he drifts around Nice, Nikita travels back through his memories to his childhood in Moscow, and to the fateful school trip to Paris that set in motion the story that eventually ends with him standing in Nina’s empty apartment, staring out at the grey Nice waterfront. 

In the emigrant’s pessimistic consciousness, the timelines intertwine. The city, Paris, Nice, Brussels, becomes a mere memory. The romantic dream of a cosmopolitan Europe slowly falls apart, while the city of his childhood, Moscow, becomes increasingly attractive and shimmering.

Maxim Grigoriev’s EUROPE is a new kind of novel about exile, a reckoning with nostalgia and homesickness. It is also a hate-filled hymn to the centuries-long history of Russian emigration, with the misanthropic graphomaniac, philosopher and failed terrorist Nina at its centre.